


Angels Americana

by pollutedstar



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Americana, Gothic, M/M, No Plot/Plotless, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Religious Sam Winchester, Season/Series 04, Season/Series 05, YES Cas has four wings because BIBLICAL CANON ESTABLISHES THAT, and i mean that in the new american gothic novel sense, give the angels more wings. give em., yes i'm ex christian how can you tell
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-25
Updated: 2020-08-25
Packaged: 2021-03-07 01:41:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,206
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26098816
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pollutedstar/pseuds/pollutedstar
Summary: It’s more about motel rooms than chapels. The prophet of the Lord is an alcoholic who struggles to keep afloat—God doesn’t have time to drag every hack writer out of the gutter, you know? And the angels are more willing to kill than either of them had expected. Dean thinks they’re supposed to have fluffy wings and Sam thinks they’re supposed to be wheels of eyes with incomprehensible power, and it turns out they have trench coats.
Relationships: Castiel/Dean Winchester
Comments: 40
Kudos: 355
Collections: The Destiel Fan Survey Favs Collection





	Angels Americana

**Author's Note:**

> I am once again posting a mini-Supernatural fic while still working on my magnus opus 26 page (so far) Daredevil final chapter...... I love y'all

Dean is actually more religious than Sam these days. He’s not a Bible-thumping, afraid-of-God, believes-in-miracles kind of religious, but that’s not what religion is, it turns out. Dean goes out to the vending machine with a bottle of liquor in his hands to avoid Sam praying every night, but he’s still the one who meets the angels.

It’s more about motel rooms than chapels. The prophet of the Lord is an alcoholic who struggles to keep afloat—God doesn’t have time to drag every hack writer out of the gutter, you know? And the angels are more willing to kill than either of them had expected. Dean thinks they’re supposed to have fluffy wings and Sam thinks they’re supposed to be wheels of eyes with incomprehensible power, and it turns out they have trench coats.

Once, in front of a Halloween store in a hodunk town in Ohio, Castiel had stopped speaking in the middle of a lecture on holy wrath, his feet coming to a halt. He froze so suddenly that Dean bumped into his shoulder and grumbled about angels just not Getting It.

Sam followed Cas’s gaze to the window where a pair of little kid angel wings were sitting on the $5 rack.

“You want a pair?” Dean asked sarcastically. Castiel’s shoulder blades shifted along with his demeanor, and he stormed forward like a warrior of God really ought to.

* * *

Angels meet on empty playgrounds that always have cars in the parking lot. The Michael sword is legally dead and physically homeless. Dean cracks open a beer with a picked-off label and offers it to Cas, who’s wiping blood from his nose. He hasn’t even been in a battle, or at least not one in a war he recognizes. Some kid down the street, desperate for a high or food for his family, mugged him. Dean thinks it’s funny, a kid getting the upper hand on an angel of the Lord, but he also thinks it fucking sucks, because he’s been that kid. Looking Castiel up and down, Dean thinks that if he hadn’t gotten so good at pool, he and Cas could have met the same way.

“Come on, how old was he? Who got the best Mr. ‘I’ll Throw You Back Into Hell?’” Dean ribs on him, leaning against the counter.

Cas shrugs. The angel shrugs a lot when Dean’s around.

“I don’t know, I didn’t really see him.”

He’s happy that angels are not capable of sin the way humans are. The lie is an easy one, even if it makes his mouth taste a little sour. Cas can still picture the child, who couldn’t have been more than eleven, eyes greener than the trees of the seventh day, running away from him. As an angel, it is not his duty to forgive. Guns don’t understand war, just targets. But watching the boy’s hands, thrown out on either side of him like they were nailed to the air, Cas had stayed on the ground and let him get away.

* * *

Castiel doesn’t sleep. Dean is inordinately jealous. The idea of being awake and in use of himself all day sounds like Heaven to him. He doesn’t understand why Cas wastes four hours a night sitting on the floor or chair of their motel room and watching. Dean knows he does because he often wakes up from night terrors to the cold presence of his guardian angel.

His eyes immediately flick to the familiar silhouette sat iron-straight next to him, his back not even touching the headboard. The lamp between Dean and Sam’s beds is turned on, and Cas is reading the Bible.

At first the angel is so still and unblinking that Dean assumes he doesn’t know the hunter is awake. Dean’s wrong of course, because he can never assume anything in his life. Not that his boots will stay together through the winter, not that his brother won’t side with the Devil the moment they step into Georgia, and not that he can fool an angel with fake-sleeping skills he’s been practicing since he was a teenager.

“This is wrong, I think,” Cas whispers as he flips a skin-thin page, and Dean rubs the heat of Hell from his eyes.

“Didn’t know angels were allowed to do that. Think.”

When Cas looks up, Dean wants his eyes to be glowing. They’re not. The faint outline of wings, all four of them, fade against the wall, and Dean thinks that it’s not just the dark that’s making them hard to distinguish.

“We’re not,” he says.

* * *

The first time Dean rolls on top of Cas in the backseat of the Impala, the radio flares so loud he has to cover his ears while Cas gains control of himself. When the ringing stops, he takes his hands off his ears and laces them into Cas’s hair. The angel hums, leaning back, and Dean would never admit out loud that in the deepest parts of his body, all he wants to do is hold Cas until he’s safe.

Cas murmurs against Dean’s cheek, “I wish we had a bed for this. A room.”

“You mean a home,” Dean bites back, more bitter than he means to as he accidentally kicks the door handle and his knee slips on the seat.

Baby _is_ home—it’s where he cries and screams and sings, and really, what else can he ask for?

While he rests his chin in Cas’s neck, he talks about Kansas like the angel doesn’t already know. Talks about Christmas and bedtime stories and the scent of cinnamon, and it turns into gasoline and the motors of the Impala and the way he had fed Sammy when they were kids.

It’s no wonder Dean’s Heaven was a road—it’s all he’s ever had.

* * *

Sam hates watching Castiel eat. He doesn’t do it often, but every time it drives Sam up the diner wall. Angels do not eat, they do not drink, and they do not watch daytime television. When Dean says that Cas is being punished in Heaven for having his priorities out of whack, Sam is almost relieved.

No, that makes him sound terrible. Dean is stressed about it and really, Sam likes the disobedient angel with a little too much spunk. He just hates watching Castiel, angel of Thursday, soldier of God, eat M&Ms with his big brother on a stained bedsheet. It’s not holy. It’s not good. It’s not what Sam knows angels are.

He almost wishes Dean had been right about Christianity the whole time. 

* * *

Sam points out the window and dutifully says, “Cows,” as Dean drives. He does it multiple times, and on one farm that's over a hundred acres, he does it twice. Cas, furrowing his brow, waits a few more miles before contributing.

“Tree,” he says, pointing, and Dean laughs so hard he has to pull over. Sam grinds his teeth because he really doesn’t want to be the kind of man who laughs at angels.

“I don’t understand what is so humorous,” Cas sighs, although he does. He might not know exactly what he did, but he knows he did it wrong, and that’s why it’s funny. The man he’s doubting his own Father for has the nerve to laugh at him for trying to fit in. Cas wants to be wrathful. He finds himself smiling.

Within a mile after the tree incident, they see a billboard ahead with bold letters declaring HELL IS REAL. Dean takes a wrong turn to avoid passing by it.

* * *

“You are uncomfortable around me. Why?” he asks Sam bluntly while Dean is in the bathroom. “I am uncomfortable around you because you have demonic powers and radiate something dark. You, however, were religious long before meeting me. What is the problem?”

Sam swallows. He likes to think of himself as the most direct member of his family, but sometimes Castiel’s bluntness startles him. Picking up a menu to avoid looking at the angel, he says, “You’re supposed to be better than us, Cas.”

“That is untrue. God did not have favorites among His creations.”

“That’s not what I…” Sam runs a hand through his hair. “You’re a soldier of Heaven. You raised my brother out of Hell. You’re just… you’re not supposed to like milkshakes or whatever.”

“I’ve never consumed a milkshake,” Castiel states, his eyebrows coming together.

“You’ve never had a milkshake?” Dean demands as he slides into the seat next to Cas, startling them both with his approach. “Oh man, we’re fixing that.”

Before he can flag down the waiter, Cas shakes his head, carefully avoiding looking at Sam. “I’m good, Dean.”

Sam hunches in on himself a little when Dean ignores the angel and orders three milkshakes anyway. It’s fine, Sam thinks. None of them are actually _good,_ so it’s fine.

* * *

They take Castiel to Walmart only once before learning their mistake. While they search for canned things that can be tossed in the car for longer than they should be and still be safe to eat, Castiel wanders. 

“You think he’s disappointed in us?” Sam asks after Cas has been gone for almost seven full minutes.

Dean tosses a box of cereal into the cart. “What’d you do?”

“No not _us_ us, but like… the bigger us. You know. People.” He throws his hands around, gesturing down the aisle. “You think he looks at all this... consumerism and poverty and whatever and wishes he’d never come back?”

“Who the fuck knows? Aren’t you supposed to be the Christian?”

“Well you’re God’s righteous man and the angel’s best friend so shouldn’t _you_ know?”

Dean stops to look at him, standing in front of boxes that are stacked in a way that makes Sam think of a cross. He almost asks Dean to move.

“Well between stopping the apocalypse and figuring out why Heaven wants me to do their dirty work, I guess it never comes up in the pillow talk.”

Dean turns and starts calling Cas’s name down the aisles, finishing the conversation with a reminder that makes Sam’s footsteps a little heavier.

It’s not like he’s jealous. He’s not even into guys, let alone culturally incompetant guys with no idea how to dress or talk to people. But sometimes he remembers that at the end of the day, his brother lays down with an angel and he lays down in a demon’s bloody sheets, and it makes him feel ashamed.

Not that he’s cared about his opinion in years, but sometimes Sam wonders which of them their father would be more disgusted with.

They find Cas in the movies, LED lights behind him framing his head in a hazy circle, staring at a copy of _The Passion of Christ_ on sale for $7.99.

Cas doesn’t go shopping with them again.

* * *

Sam still prays, even though it makes his hands burn a little when he clasps them. He tells himself he’s just imagining it, that Ruby and Dean’s teasing is just getting to his head. He ignores the way his palms are a little pink every day before he goes to bed.

Dean is out at a bar and Sam is exhausted from holding Hell on his shoulders, so he decides to turn in early. Shifting down to his knees, he leans forward against his bed. Before he can raise his arms, he feels a heavy hand on his shoulder.

He jumps, turning to find Castiel standing above him, the smell of cheap tobacco lining his coat. He begins to tell the angel that Dean isn’t here right now, but Castiel speaks first.

“We can’t hear you, Sam,” he tells him.

“What do you—”

“Your prayers. They do not come through anymore.” He looks up, and Sam can’t tell if he’s looking to the heavens or if he just doesn’t want to meet the younger Winchester’s eye. “You are kneeling for no one.”

A flap of wings and he’s gone.

* * *

Lucifer’s appearance doesn’t change anything immediately, which is more terrifying than if the world had gone dark as soon as he had burst from Hell. For all they know, he could be playing poker in a seedy underground bar. Sure, there’s war and famine and pestilence and death, but that’s not exactly _new._ Lucifer should be hitting them with the apocalypse, and he’s giving them everyday life.

A man approaches them and hands them a pamphlet. The front boasts that the end is near, and it makes Dean want to cry and makes Sam want to take a hit, and he’s not even sure of what. The two of them share an equal distaste for this kind of thing, so they’ve mastered every step for a clean away. Maybe the guy can see it—the unsaveable set of their shoulders. He goes after the third in their group instead.

“If you die today, do you know where you will go?” he asks Castiel morbidly, a hand on the angel’s wrist.

Castiel looks at the paper in his hand.

“I betrayed my Father for you,” he says seriously.

The guy takes it in stride. “Seek redemption through Christ, brother.”

Maybe it’s the “brother.” Castiel already misses being called that by holy beings.

He takes the pamphlet.


End file.
